Although global information technology spending is forecast to decrease in 2020, the economic crisis induced by COVID-19 will not jeopardize investments in infrastructure and cloud deployments, according to IDC. New rounds of funding for edge data center services for EdgeMicro Corp. and DartPoints Holding Company, LLC, are a case in point.

EdgeMicro pockets $5m for deployments

EdgeMicro has secured $5 million to grow customer portfolio and invest in expanding its micro data centers to simplify edge deployments, according to a company statement. DH Capital, LLC, an investment banking firm serving companies in the internet infrastructure, communications, and software sectors, served as EdgeMicro’s financial advisor.

The new data center sites will be announced in the following weeks. To ensure growth and business development, EdgeMicro has expanded its leadership team by adding Lauri Abrahamson as director of business development and Christian Kersgard as senior manager, service delivery. Together, they share over 40 years of experience in the telecom and data center industries.

In February, Cloudflare joined as an anchor tenant in dozens of EdgeMicro colocation sites in the U.S.

DartPoints adds new CEO and funding partner

Edge colocation data center owner and operator DartPoints has received funding from D.C.-based private equity fund Astra Capital Management to expand across North America through a buy and build strategy, according to a company statement. The stake gives Astra a majority position in DartPoints.

DartPoints has appointed telecom veteran Scott Willis as President and CEO, effective immediately. Willis has previously served as CEO of Zinwave and held executive roles at Ericsson, Nokia, BellSouth, Sprint and Keybridge.

“I am thrilled to partner with Astra and join the DartPoints team,” said Willis in a prepared statement. “The growth of locally consumed and generated content, the shift in use of cloud computing and the increase in application performance requirements have exposed inefficiencies in our network infrastructure. DartPoints is well positioned to support the growth in edge colocation data centers across North America as digital businesses seek to move closer to their users.”

“DartPoints is an innovator in the data center industry, which is undergoing significant evolutionary changes. Application performance, cost and resiliency are forcing customers toward a more distributed IT infrastructure,” said Brian Kirschbaum, a Partner at Astra, in a prepared statement. “Our investment will support DartPoints’s growth through the acquisition of existing data centers and the build out of edge colocation data centers.”

Edge colocation data centers support a high number of carriers and ensure high performance for storage and processing at the edge.

As a result of the deal DartPoints has added a number of telecom investors and executives to its board, including Brian Kirschbaum (Astra Partner), Kevin Beebe (Astra Co-Founder and Partner) and Scott Bergs (former CEO of Neutral Path Communications and COO of Midwest Wireless).

Market Trends

As previously noted, global IT spending is forecast to decrease by some 5 percent in 2020, but research firm IDC does not expect the economic crisis induced by COVID-19 to jeopardize investments in infrastructure and cloud deployments. Economic conditions will force companies to reduce costs and postpone upgrades to on-premise datacenters, IDC said, meaning that any needed capacity will need to be added by using third-party data center service providers.

EdgeMicro and DartPoints are positioning themselves to benefit from expansion of the edge infrastructure market, which is expected to see over $700 billion in capital expenditures over the next ten years, according to the State of the Edge 2020 report. Based on Tolaga Research findings, the annual spending on edge IT and data center technology will near $146 billion by 2028, at a 35 percent CAGR growth.

Analyst Perspective

The edge infrastructure market is just starting to develop and investors like Astra are making a bet on one of the early entrants. It will take significant resources to not just build the technology that enables compute in smaller increments and edge locations, but to develop the supply chain, logistics and operations to support it.